


the weight of living

by jemmasimmns (laurellance)



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, It's an Amaya Jiwe Character Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-28
Updated: 2018-03-28
Packaged: 2019-04-13 22:09:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14121867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurellance/pseuds/jemmasimmns
Summary: The pain of a legacy is as follows: knowing that you will be remembered, but your past is written in stone, your future written, ready for you to follow.Maybe so.Maybe not.In which Amaya Jiwe decides to change Kuasa's fate.





	the weight of living

**Author's Note:**

> Set immediately after I, Ava.

Amaya Jiwe heads towards the jumpship with one destination in mind. M’changa, Zambesi, 1992. The resolve in her eyes is evident in her voice, in her walk. For no one’s benefit but hers, the rest of the Legends were busy. Nathaniel in his books, worrying and immersing himself in what had happened, Zari, in the galley celebrating Ramadan, Sara no doubt trying to soothe Ava for one reason or another. Amaya doesn’t ask, nor does she care.

This is the pain of the time travel, she thinks as she walks. She can’t do anything about her future, about how tragic it would be. And right now, there was nothing more she wanted to do than to destroy the warlord who would destroy the village she lived in, to save the granddaughter who had died for her. 

This is what she would do: save her granddaughter. Allow her daughter to escape with both of her grandchildren instead of only Mari, to lead her on a path that prevented her from encountering the demon that was Mallus. 

The green-yellow hued walls of time are cracked, scattered with the marks of the demon. Her totem rests on her neck and from it she senses the pervasive darkness that is Mallus. Seeping from the fringes into the fabric of time itself, the once strong and unbroken walls that protected history fractured as lightning bolts danced among it’s last line of defense, encroaching everything within a net of perceptual fear. 

The walls were once strong, as she had observed them from within the window of the cargo bay. Unbreakable. They held steady against attack after attack, anachronism after anachronism, but all things will bend eventually. 

They bend, then they break. Time bends around her as the jumpship travels, and she can sense Mallus growing stronger. She had felt his power within her beloved, cursed, totem, and she had expelled it. It whispered to her grudges and encouraged her worst nature, daring her to defy all the values she held close to her. Family. Tradition. Love. Justice.

It whispers to her the ultimate desires of her heart, the dreams and the wishes of what she can never have in his life time. Her family’s happiness without a single inkling of tragedy. Her daughter and her two grandchildren reunited with her, singing and dancing around the fire in the evening. A happy ending for her and Nathaniel, where the two of them could be happy. 

But that is all they would be: dreams. Fantasies. They would not happen, not when her fate was etched into the walls of history, when the tragedy of her village was passed down orally, from mother to son, father to daughter. She had asked Gideon to show her what her village looked like in 2018. It is empty, scattered, remains of houses reclaimed by nature. Grass sprouted around where houses used to be, tree trunks once halved now with vines growing atop them. 

Her granddaughter, her brave, honorable granddaughter Kuasa had died to save her life. She had held her granddaughter as she died, after Mallus, Nora, had ripped the water totem from Kuasa’s chest, and in that moment it felt like she had lost a part of her.

She had always told Nathaniel that her destiny would wait for her. That her heartbreaking, tragic destiny would always be there as a shadow that trailed her eternally. It would be the fate that would await her in 1942, and how she had hated it. How she had delayed it, adventuring through time, falling in love with a man she was never supposed to meet, saying goodbye to her teammates time scattered, dead or neither. 

But never, never had she wanted to change time so badly. She could accept what awaited her in 1942, it was the writing on the wall after all. She was destined to go back to 1942, to fall in love with another man and have a daughter to him. That daughter would eventually have two daughters, Mari and Kuasa, and there would have been an attack on their village in 1992, fifty years later, that would result in her death and the destruction of her village.

She realizes now that she doesn’t want that future. That the blood in her veins screams furiously to change what is written, to create a better ending for her family. She can take her death in her old age, that was no problem. She cannot accept the death of her granddaughter at the hands of Mallus.

No, that was never part of her future. 

So she aims to change time. She knows the Legends will worry, but they will be alright. They have each other and they have Captain Hunter. They have allies, as found in the Time Bureau and John Constantine. The Justice Society of America. She knows they will be upset, confused, but if she was being honest with herself, their reactions don’t matter to her. She hopes, prays that they will understand her actions, not because she cares for their opinions on it but because they’ve all lost people they loved. Family members who had been ripped away from them far too soon. Friends that had been taken from them cruelly, aunts and uncles dead of preventable diseases. Fathers, to war. Grandfathers, self sacrificing themselves for the greater good.

She knows that deep down, they would have made the same decision if they could. Without a second heartbeat, she knows that they would have changed time regardless of the consequences if they could. But this was the curse of time travel, she realized. You couldn't save everyone, but give them a good send off. Wish them goodbye one last time, knowing that their fates were forever changed, solidified into the timeline and that all she could do was wish them happiness in whatever their future was.

She cannot change her future. She cannot change the fate of her village, or the history of her people. She cannot change the fact that her daughter will have to flee with her granddaughter Mari from Zambesi, but she can change what would happen to Kuasa in 1992, to save from her death. So that is what she will do, because that is all she can do. Kuasa deserved that much, from the grandmother who had called her granddaughter irredeemable. 

Amaya has been many things. Soldier. Veteran. Friend. Mourner. Mother. Grandmother. Best Friend. Girlfriend. Ex-Girlfriend. 

She will never, never be remembered as a coward. As someone who had a chance to change something and refused to, even though it would have made the barriers of time so much more volatile. It was the least she could do for Kuasa.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr at zaritomazs/chochang.


End file.
